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Bay Area Congress Members Call for Better Data on Hate Crimes Against Asian American Community

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At a press conference on Friday meant to denounce the recent spike of hate incidents and violence against Asian Americans, congressional leaders voiced their concerns that existing data on the number of hate crimes in the country may be incomplete.

“These numbers likely represent only a fraction of the actual number of crimes. Many crimes go unreported due to fear, due to language barriers, lack of resources and differences in law enforcement strategies and investigations,” said Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Oakland.

Those lawmakers are now calling for the passage of a bill, the NO HATE Act, to fund hate incident data collection efforts.

In January, a 91-year-old Asian American man was violently shoved to the ground in Oakland’s Chinatown. That same month, an 84-year-old Asian American man was killed after being slammed to the ground in San Francisco's Anza Vista neighborhood.

These incidents are just two examples of the numerous attacks on Asian Americans that have taken place in the region, and across the nation, since the pandemic began.

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Lee joined House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and members of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, Congressional Black Caucus and Congressional Hispanic Caucus — collectively known as the Tri-Caucus — to push for the passage of the NO HATE Act.

The bill would create grants for states and local governments to improve their responses to hate crimes, improve the reporting of hate crime data and also "allows a court to order, as a penalty for a violation of a federal hate crime statute, a defendant to participate in educational classes or community service related to the community harmed by the defendant's offense as part of a supervised release.”

Speakers noted that according to Stop AAPI Hate — an organization based out of San Francisco State University that tracks self-reported hate incidents against Asian American and Pacific Islander individuals — there have been nearly 3,000 self-reported hate incidents between March and December 2020.

The organization told KQED that of those incidents, more than 1,200 were recorded in California and over 700 of those took place in the Bay Area.

Members of the Tri-Caucus are also calling for a meeting with the Department of Justice to follow-up on President Biden’s executive order condemning anti-Asian racism that arose from the pandemic.

The order directs the Department of Health and Human Services "to consider issuing guidance describing best practices to advance cultural competency, language access, and sensitivity towards AAPIs in the federal government's COVID-19 response." It also directs the Department of Justice to work with AAPI communities "to prevent hate crimes and harassment."

Pelosi said people need to be informed on how to document and report these incidents, citing a recent incident in New York in which a white man pushed a 52-year-old Asian American woman to the ground. She said New York police identified the man but they couldn’t confirm it was a hate crime.

Victims and bystanders should "take down the words" of attackers or harassers to help document the hate crimes, said Pelosi.

The speaker also mentioned that instances of Islamophobia should also be reported as they are included in AAPI hate incidents and condemned white supremacy, calling it the “biggest bucket of concern when it comes to domestic terrorism.”

Julie Chang

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